Detainee Treatment Act

A few more points worth noting about the new Military Commissions Act amendments passed by Congress yesterday: Just as the House bill circulating earlier did, the amendments passed would still allow some coerced testimony to be used in court if the military judge decides it’s reliable and it wasn’t obtained using “cruel, inhuman, or degrading [...]

On the same day that the government produced the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogations, it also turned over seven more memos and letters from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

There’s no shortage of criticism directed at President Obama’s disinclination to prosecute CIA interrogators for torture, a position he’ll surely reiterate during his visit later this afternoon to CIA headquarters. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald objected to the Obama administration’s position, and he also rounded up similar objections from Keith Olbermann, Jonathan Turley, John Dean and Bruce Fein. [...]

In reporting yesterday on the fallout from Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) proposal last week to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the Bush administration’s alleged crimes in connection with its “war on terror,” I neglected to mention that in 2005  Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) had proposed a similar commission — which he called [...]